The Business Centre
Asustek Computer unveiled its first supercomputer on Monday, the desktop computer-sized ESC 1000, which uses Nvidia graphics processors to attain speeds up to 1.1 teraflops.
One teraflop is one trillion flops (floating point operations per second), a measure of computing speed. Computers able to perform at such high speeds can be used in a variety of ways, including scientific research, image manipulation, engineering modeling or for medical purposes.
Asus's ESC 1000 comes with a 3.33GHz Intel LGA1366 Xeon W3580 microprocessor designed for servers, along with 960 graphics processing cores from Nvidia inside three Tesla c1060 Computing Processors and one Quadro FX5800., according to a spec sheet from Asustek.
The c1060 is a dual-slot PCI card with no graphics ports on the back.
Nvidia has promoted its graphics cores as an alternative to microprocessors to build speedier computers that require less electricity.
The ESC 1000 is made for 64-bit computing and carries 24GB of DDR3 (double data rate, third generation) 1333MHz DRAM.
The chassis on the supercomputer is 445 millimeters by 217.5 mm by 545 mm.
The ESC 1000 has a 500GB SATA II hard drive on board and its power supply is rated for 1100 watts.
A note in Asustek's literature said the ESC 1000 has a cost structure in software and hardware of US$14,519 over five years, but an Asustek representative declined to give a per-unit price or when the ESC 1000 would be available globally.
The supercomputers are ready to ship, he said.
The ESC 1000 is the result of collaboration between Asustek, Nvidia and Taiwan's National Chao Tung University.
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Comments
woooooot chill winston
The teslas are not graphics card lol even though they may look like one pmsl
This concept is a developed one from IBM who placed the power ppc processors on a pci board allowing a scalable workstation. Nvidia just built on this idea with there multi SPU cores, yes there SPU's not cores like a main x86 system has.
Amazing on card processing power but bottleknecked by a 4gb/s bus(PCIe x16 gen2) yet even saying that its the closest thing to blade racks in a single deskside machine. Note blades have 10gb/s+++ IO so there still much faster but hey the speed on each tesla card well rock on.
games games games games this will have no effect at all on computer games well unless you rebuild the game engine to use the cores, i think it needs be said that compute power is different to graphics gpu power, it takes allot to build a game engine to use 8 cores not alone 240 cores/card, yet its not imposible.
This is a serious toy and its fair to say unless you build program your own games/software its a waste the time. Being a gentoo linux user compile times are a big issue for me and this looks like a solution not to mention game engine development in linux. What ever you build to use this mind you wont work on anything else unless someone else has the same setup so kind of pants for software portability. Yes you could make it so it auto scales or auto detects cores i guess lol i never tried that so dont quote me. I am sure it would be very buggy aswell.
hope that clears things up ( i wounder what this would be like with an ati hd5870 in it along side these tesla cards urm any rich people on here)
teraflops
Although the tech is still amazing are they sure the system only performs at 1.1 teraflops?
The ATI 4870 operates at up to 1.2 teraflops so does that make my system superior? (I haz 2, a Core 2 Quad 9550, 4GB 1066mhz, etc).
AuroraUX Unix
Does it run AuroraUX^[1] ?
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuroraUX
Been there, done that
I built something similar to your AMD machine about 10 years ago. It had dual Pentium 3 processors with a Voodoo graphics card and 128M of SDRAM. And of course, the original release of Debian.
I would guess it's about as similar to your machine as your machine is to the one in the article... anyway.
Late to the game, man, late to the game.
If it's any consolation I used linux.
That is in no way similar
You are missing about 1000 processing cores and probably something in the order of 700GFLOPS before your 'under 2k' system is in any way similar to the system described.
Lol
Wow, for someone who built their own computer, I would have thought you would know a thing or two about technology!!
I guess you just don't know what a NVidia Tesla computing processor is, think of a room of rack systems for like a renderfarm if 3d rendering is your thing, but small enough to fit 3 of those rooms into a single workstation! AND it has an Intel Xeon workstation processor........and you think your AMD dual core is better? Just because you have a gpgpu does not mean its in any way comparable. Yours could not do anything like waht that ASUS is capable of.
I really thank to one who
I really thank to one who wrote this article. I have always been reading and writing texts like this in blogs. Also, I, as a daily writer, present my respects to everyone. I just watched videos like this in youtube. I research in all areas.
I think people must first research before writing...
I really thank to one who
I really thank to one who wrote this article. I have always been reading and writing texts like this in blogs. Also, I, as a daily writer, present my respects to everyone. I just watched videos like this in youtube. I research in all areas.
I think people must first research before writing...
LOL. Something like this.
LOL. Something like this. Shitty AMD (dual core LOL), cheap stuff, 1 GPU, etc.... ahahaha.. nice joke.
Are you blind?
While your computer above may not be anything to shake a stick at, you think it holds ANY weight at all to the ASUS mentioned above?
Keep in mind that it has 3 NVIDIA Tesla's. That's 960 CORES, plus the Quad in the Intel Xeon. How does your pithy little AMD dual core even come close to comparing to that?
been there, done that
i built something similiar to this for myself a year ago for under 2k. and unlike the model here, it had SATA raid.
AMD dual core (upgradable to quad-core)
16GB DDR2
4x 7.2k rpm SATA drives on raid 0
1 Nvidia GeForce GPGPU (upgradable to 2)
5.1x surround sound (onboard)
a cheap PCI video card
Gigabit ethernet
onboard cool n'quiet CPU power saving
extra fans and a filtered air vent above the cpu fan.
and, ofcourse, linux.
Late to the game, ASUStek, late to the game.
If it's any consolation I used your motherboard.
lol
+1 on crysis
Compilers, connectivity, et al
Did you try any of the links, or google? Better yet, just DIY and post the real world results yourself.
Compilers, connectivity, real world performance
How about some real information?
Expensive...
you can buy pretty much the same rig in pieces $6,000. We just did that in our lab. The system works great if you have computational problems which are easily parrallelizable.
Factor in
You aren't factoring in Inflation, and hyper inflation is about to hit.
Factor in
You aren't factoring in Inflation, and hyper inflation is about to hit.
unit error
I think you mean 1400 watts, not watts/hr.... otherwise your units make no sense
TCO
Well... let's see...
The three C1060's will consume ~1400 watts/hr. Add in the rest of the system, and you are looking at about 2kw/hr on this thing (running flat out).
Based on $0.10 USD per kwh, you get:
$0.10 * 2 * 24 * 365 = $1752.00 / year
Over five years, this comes out to $8760. Add in the initial $6k in parts, and you are pushing that $15k pretty easily.
Read the article.
US$14,519 *over* five years means total 5-year TCO: It's the initial cost plus it probably includes what you'll spend on electricity to power this beast, as well as a replacement hard-drive, and any other stuff they think might fail within that period.
What is the pricing info supposed to mean?
A note in Asustek's literature said the ESC 1000 has a cost structure in software and hardware of US$14,519 over five years.[.
What is this supposed to mean? Is the cost mentioned the cost to Asustek or the cost to their customer? Perhaps the customer has to pay $14,519 per year for five years, for a total cost of over $70K?
gaming?
what the hell for? C1060 isn't something your game will use, so it'll be a really expensive so-so rig.
not posible 'Why so little'
it takes over an hour to write 500 gigs to a hard disk with today's current hard disk speeds.
i want someone to install windows 7 on this and do some gaming benchmarks.
Why is this news? ASUS is VERY late to the party?
NVidia has been selling this for about 2 years through many First and Second tier OEMs.
Many scientific research apps
Many scientific research apps don't need that much hard drive space, so if you need it the upgrade...
true
that is true but im sure if you doing research of that nature you probably have some type of network that is working with you, a SAN or something im sure.
SAN or NAS
Most systems of this type use internal storage only to start the system. The terabytes of data that are often required are generally stored on external storage such as a Storage Area Network or Network Attached Storage.
Why so little
Hard drive space? Many scientific research apps could fill up the drive in minutes...
lul
lul
lol
lol
benchmarks.
stick a graphics port or two on the back and run crysis in full flight.
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